Exam Profile: Cisco 200-120 CCNA Routing and Switching

This article profiles the Cisco CCNA 200-120 exam for the CCNA Routing and Switching certification. Pearson IT Certification provides a variety of exam preparation tools to help our customers in their quest for certification. As part of our service to you, we have developed this Exam Profile series. Each profile is developed based on the testing experience of one of our trainers or authors. You won’t get exact questions or answers, but you will get a real feel for the exam. Each profile describes question forms, trouble spots, hints for exam preparation, and recommendations for additional study resources. Find out what you can expect to see on the exam and how you can better prepare for it.

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The Cisco Certified Network Associate Routing and Switching certification, or CCNA Routing and Switching, has served as the most important starting point in the Cisco certification world for decades. With the most recent changes to this venerable certification in March 2013, the role of CCNA Routing and Switching has changed slightly. What remains unchanged is that CCNA Routing and Switching continues to be an important early step to demonstrate mastery of core networking skills of IP routing and LAN switching.

Overview

To achieve the CCNA Routing and Switching certification, Cisco provides two testing options:

Pass one exam (CCNA 200-120)

Pass two exams (ICND1 100-101 and ICND2 200-101)

Both paths to the CCNA Routing and Switching certification cover the same topics, but this profile examines the CCNA 200-120 exam specifically.

The CCNA 200-120 exam includes a wide variety of topics that mostly tracks to two weeklong Cisco-authorized courses: The ICND1 and ICND2 courses. As a result, the CCNA exam includes:

TCP/IP

LAN Switching

Routing (IPv4 and IPv6)

IP Addressing (IPv4 and IPv6)

Cisco router and switch Command Line Interface (CLI)

WANs (point-to-point and Frame Relay)

VLANs and VLAN trunking

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)

Routing Protocols (EIGRP, OSPF)

Network Address Translation (NAT)

First-Hop Redundancy Protocols

Along with these topics, the exam requires that you know how to configure each topic, use commands to verify that each works properly, and to troubleshoot problems using a router/switch simulator on the exam.